As archaeologists prepare to announce the discovery of Richard III's remains, Alastair Smart looks for clues to the king's much-maligned character in early portraits of him.

Poor old Richard III. King for a mere two years, two months in the 1480s, he was a brave and astute military leader, who also introduced the nation’s first form of legal aid. Yet, still he’s the most reviled monarch in our history, his name even finding its way into cockney rhyming slang to denote excrement.

In large part, this is down to his depiction in Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592) as a “poisonous bunch-back’d toad”, who has his two young nephews murdered in the Tower of London to assure his position as king. No matter that no historical evidence for such a crime exists.

Drawing on biased historical accounts like Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (1519) – which basically amount to Tudor-legitimising propaganda – Shakespeare’s Richard is a limping hunchback with a withered arm: as deformed in appearance as he was in character. This indeed is how posterity “remembers” him, and much of the current fuss in Leicester has surrounded one particular skeleton’s curved spine.

Yet, how accurate was Shakespeare’s description of Richard really? And can contemporary imagery help us judge? Sadly, no portrait of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, survives from his lifetime. However, the Society of Antiquaries does possess the earliest copy of one, from 1510, in which an earnest, upright Richard has no deformity whatsoever.

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This is entirely in keeping with contemporary written sources, which speak only of his being short and lean: the Scottish ambassador complimented “so great a mind in so small a body”, while the Silesian knight Nicholas von Popplau observed that Richard “hardly touched his food”.
Demonisation began soon after his death, though, with the tinpot historian John Rous, who – keen to ingratiate himself with Henry VII, the new king – portrayed Richard as an anti-Christ: born with fully grown teeth and hair, as well as “uneven shoulders, the right higher [than] the left”.
Thomas More followed Rous’s lead, albeit switching the abnormality from right shoulder to left, presumably to play up Richard’s sinister side (sinister being Latin for left).A second Society of Antiquaries portrait, from 1550, duly depicts Richard with an unnaturally raised left shoulder. He also holds a broken sword, symbol of his broken kingship.
The hunchback tag now stuck, perhaps helped by the fact that Richard’s personal emblem was a wild boar – a naturally humpbacked animal – and the distinction between man and symbol grew blurred.
Most surviving portraits of Richard (20 or so in total) come from the late 16th century, when the fashion in great halls across the nation was to display a set of images of each English monarch chronologically. These were produced cheaply and formulaically in workshops, and based on a pre-established likeness: in Richard’s casea portrait from 1520 currently in the Royal Collection.
It is a work of subtle but significant slander. As would thereafter become the norm in pictures of him, Richard has uneven shoulders, villainously thin lips and malevolently narrow eyes.
Recent X-ray analysis reveals, though, that these slanderous touches were actually added soon after the painting was first completed. It seems to have started out simply as a copy of a now-lost portrait of Richard from life, only for alterations to be demanded by someone high up at the court of Henry VIII (in whose collection the picture was inventoried).
Shakespeare, then, was merely completing, with typical embellishment, a job already started by artists and historians – immortalising Richard III as a crookback Machiavel and implicitly championing his vanquisher, Henry VII, as founder of a heroic new dynasty: the Tudors. It’s a dynasty we associate to this day with thrusting England out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world.